In conventional methods, content published on Internet by publishers is available in uncategorized format. This makes it difficult for advertisers to select the websites or the content with which they want to place their advertisements. The advertisements of a company project the company's brand to customers. Companies may like to have a TV-like content channels category system to help them know on which Internet “channel” their advertisements are being placed. This is especially important for video advertisements, as the brand of a company is projected much more prominently to the customers with video advertisements as compared to textual advertisements. In some existing services, the content published on Internet by publishers may be categorized into some general web-based categories, for example, Open Directory (dmoz) categories or Yahoo directories based on the title and metadata associated with the content. The title and metadata associated with the content may be obtained using RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) feeds or Atom feeds. Further, advertising websites, such as www.tribalfusion.com, provide an advertiser with various channels to advertise in, for example, automotive, business, consumer electronics etc. However, any categorization of content on a website or other property based on semantics, metadata, references to other relevant documents on the property or website may not be relevant to the category listing that is preferred by advertisers.
Further, publishers may want to gauge the demand for their content in general and also in the specific domain in which they publish content. Also, advertisers may want to place their advertisements on the most popular websites. Such information may help in setting individual prices for advertisements placed with content published by the publishers. Moreover, publishers may also want to have access to information regarding the advertisements being placed by the advertisers. The information regarding advertisements may be the metadata associated with the advertisement.
Moreover, advertisers may find it difficult to find relevant content for their advertisements, as the content published on Internet by publishers is available in uncategorized format or in irrelevant categories. The content categorized into general web-based categories like Open Directory (dmoz) categories is not very useful for the advertisers. The publishers also do not have a method to gauge the demand for their content.
Therefore, there is a need for system and method that categorized content into categories that are understood by both the advertisers and the publishers; and hence allows for better information exchange between the advertisers and the publishers. Specifically, there is a need for content-based categorization of the content published on Internet by publishers, analogous to content-based categorization of TV channels, which is more relevant to the advertisers and publishers. Further, there is a need for method that provides demographic information about content on the Internet, such as a measure of content in specific categories, popularity of certain content, advertisements being placed by the advertisers, etc.